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Pentagon Papers

30 years ago, the Supreme Court decided it was okay that the New York Times published parts of the classified Pentagon Papers, allowing Americans to see the lies and secrets of government officials during the Vietnam War. Host Brooke Gladstone talks with Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the documents to the Times.

Transcript

Pentagon Papers

July 14, 2001

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thirty years ago this summer, we experienced what is arguably the greatest press leak in history. Certainly it was the longest. The 7,000 page Pentagon Papers. The papers revealed a government struggling to make the Vietnam War palatable to an increasingly hostile American public. It shows government officials, especially President Johnson, ignoring and misrepresenting the facts and violating their promises -- lying to the public and lying to each other. One of those officials was Daniel Ellsberg who decided to let that history out, first through Congress; then on the networks and finally successfully in the New York Times, followed closely by the Washington Post. The Nixon Administration retaliated. The president's famous "plumbers" burgled Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office and reportedly tried to attack him at a demonstration. He was pursued as a spy and finally surrendered to the FBI under the Espionage Act. The newspapers, and there were many of them, who published parts of the Pentagon Papers faced legal penalties themselves. But journalist Neil Sheehan at the New York Times who first accepted the papers set the standard for courage, followed by the rest of the American press. The courts ultimately lifted the injunctions that had been slapped on the newspapers and acquitted Ellsberg. That's the quick history. Daniel Ellsberg, take us back to the moment you made the decision to bring the Pentagon Papers to the press.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: I'd been trying to get them out through congressional hearings and was promised several times by various senators or congressmen that they would move ahead, but each time they backed off for fear of the retaliation by the executive branch, and finally I decided the only way to do it was go-- to go directly to the newspapers.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Neil Sheehan said that it was a relatively simple decision at the time. We have a sp--brief clip of him in a 1971 interview with CBS, and let's play that.

NEIL SHEEHAN: In terms of what we were able to obtain, it can be freely used, because no real military security question is concerned, or diplomatic security. What really is, is, is at stake is, is the question of, of enlightening the public!-- [LAUGHS] about one of the most traumatic experiences the country's ever had! And I made a decision, personal decision, that this belonged in the public domain! It was public property! It, it, it's, it's public history! It was paid for by the people of this country with, with, with 50,000 lives and nearly a hundred billion dollars and that they had a right to know this information!

BROOKE GLADSTONE:He said it wasn't a complicated decision because he was talking about history, not active military actions, but it wasn't so simple. At least you didn't find it was simple. You took it to the networks as well and they all turned you down!

DANIEL ELLSBERG: The TV stations, the NBC, ABC, CBS -- CBS took the longest to decide no; the others were quite quick. They took a couple of days actually to decide that they didn't want to fight on this one. But-- And that's why I gave the interview to Cronkite, by the way, I felt that they'd behaved more respectably in that respect than, than the other networks.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And we can play a brief clip of that famous 30 year old interview.

DANIEL ELLSBERG:I've enjoyed reading the papers the last week. I've been reading the truth about the war in the public press and it's like breathing clean air.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: I remember very well the circumstances of that. That was in a private home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. [LAUGHTER] I can say that now. The FBI was searching all over the country - to some extent, the world -for me at that time. They said it was the biggest FBI manhunt since the Lindbergh kidnapping when I made that, that interview with Walter Cronkite.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: How would you gauge the courage of the press pre-Pentagon Papers and post-Pentagon Papers?

DANIEL ELLSBERG:Well courage is contagious. Nineteen papers faced prosecution, one after the other -- as one injunction went out, another one took up that flag and carried it forward. That was courage. They were helped by the fact that the Times and, and the Post had unusual courage in being the first to do that. And having once had that experience I think a generation of journalists grew up with a good deal of pride saying we did our job - we have the guts to do this - and we can do it again. And that was a very good precedent.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What about the impact of the papers on government officials?

DANIEL ELLSBERG:Well I think nothing you can do can keep men in office from trying to hide their mistakes, their bad predictions, their crimes. When I say that it's not from inside knowledge currently; it's from my experience in the government when I was surrounded by intelligent, conscientious, patriotic people who knew from month to month and year to year that their government -- Republican or Democrat -- was deceiving the public terribly about the information it had and the expert opinions it was getting. And those people, I among them, kept their mouths shut far too long.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But as you know all too well, leakers go to trial for what they do -- a you did! [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]

DANIEL ELLSBERG:No. [LAUGHS] I was the first. Leakers don't go to trial. They're threatened with trial. I and all the others had been told that we would be breaking a law and I assumed that was true. But it wasn't until last October that any Congress had ever actually passed such a law, and if President Clinton hadn't vetoed it, we would now had a law that we've never had before, and then you would see a lot of prosecutions.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: The law that was passed and then vetoed by Clinton was an "official secrets act" so to speak?

DANIEL ELLSBERG:They didn't give it that title. I think it was part of the intelligence authorization act, and it gives criminal sanctions -- prison terms and fines -- for any official or some--or an ex-official who has held a security clearance and who's had access to classified information giving that information to unauthorized people.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: This act would have criminalized what you did with the Pentagon Papers?

DANIEL ELLSBERG:It would have clearly criminalized. I would have been certainly guilty of that. No remember, they're always giving classified information to newspapermen that they want out. It's the truly unauthorized ones that this is meant to get.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And that effort to pass that act that was vetoed by Clinton, is it still dead?

DANIEL ELLSBERG:Not at all. If the Senate was still in Republican hands, I think we'd have to expect that it would go up to President Bush for signature and that he would not veto it. If that is signed, comes back -- and it will come back -- whether it's signed - whether it passes or not is another question -- then there will be a number of prosecutions. There won't be just two. There'll be two in the next month probably. They already have their eyes, I think, on the Washington Times for example. They've been -act is almost dedicated to getting them.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well Daniel Ellsberg, thank you very much.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Thank you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Daniel Ellsberg, political analyst, former government official-- [LAUGHTER] and, and the man who committed the renowned, unauthorized disclosure of the Pentagon Papers.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Good! That sounded good. [MUSIC]

About On The Media

WNYC’s weekly investigation into how the media shapes our world view. Veteran journalists Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield give you the tools to survive the media maelstrom.

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